- Thanks so much for coming.
Thank you so much to Penny,
I've been working with her painstakingly
for the last six months to get this
amazing exhibition together,
and she did an amazing job putting all of the artwork up.
Thank you to Lenore Penfield,
and Penn College for having me as well.
It's been a real pleasure being here.
They've taken really good care of us
and it's just a really great pleasure
coming back to Williamsport.
So to begin, what I wanted to kind of start out with
is a little introduction about myself,
and kind of bear with me, I'm a little nervous.
Also, I wanted to say thank you to everybody who's here,
my family, my friends, there's so many familiar faces
in the audience, and it's really great to see you all.
Okay, so I wanted to give a little introduction
about myself and then kind of work through
chronologically all of the pieces,
and just kind of let you know where I was,
where I am now, and where I'm going.
Sound good?
And if anybody has any questions
feel free to ask at any time.
Like Penny said, I grew up here in Williamsport
and I went to Loyalsock.
I graduated in 2000 from Loyalsock Township High School
and then I went on to Penn State University
where I graduated with my bachelor's degree
in fine art in 2005.
After that, Joel, my husband who's sitting right over here,
♫ Hi Joel
We decided to move to Portland, Oregon,
where we kind of restarted our life in a beautiful place.
We went on an adventure and just kind of started this
beautiful, new, creative life of ours.
So I got to really making art there.
I was making art in college, mostly studies,
and there was kind of one body of work at the end
that was mostly based in oil,
and a lot of figurative work.
But that's the last time I've actually done any work
with the figure, or, I'm sorry, not the figure,
with oil painting,
until this body which you see behind me,
and a couple pieces right back here.
So this is my first venture back into that,
and I made all of these in the last six months.
When I was in undergrad I worked a bit with oils
but not too much,
and then when I got to Portland I started working
with drawing mostly,
and mostly with pen and ink and markers
and doing more illustrative stuff,
working with illustrations.
and kind of Etsy-esque.
A lot of you probably know what Etsy is.
Back in the day, about 2006,
I actually was selling a lot.
It was, Etsy was kind of a different marketplace at the time
and it was a lot more visual art and a lot less
of the crafty, even vintage or thrift-store kind of finds
that you find on there.
At the time it was all visual art.
So I was doing really well economically selling my work,
but they were tiny little pieces
and not really pushing my work or my practice
as much as I had liked.
And then after that I was like, you know,
I'm doing well with this but I really wanna push myself
a lot further and give myself a new challenge.
So I applied to grad school and I got into
the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco,
and Joel and I moved to San Francisco in 2010,
and we've been there ever since.
I graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2012
and yeah, I've been teaching since then.
I teach at the San Francisco Art Institute
and I also teach at City College,
and I make my work the rest of the time.
So that's a little bit of an introduction to me.
So to start kind of talking about the work
and what's in the gallery,
I wanted to start with the colored pencil pieces
which are in the back here.
I don't know if people wanna move,
or you're welcome to just kind of hang out where you are.
So the colored pencil pieces are in the back in this corner.
They were dealing with the figure and masking, mostly,
and this was kind of my body of work from graduate school.
When I was in grad school I worked with
this amazing professor, his name's Brett Reichman,
and he's a really incredible oil painter, drawer,
and really, really, highly-rendered
photo-realistic paintings of the figure.
So I started working with him
and I took this colored pencil thing to the Nth degree.
He was like, "You like colored pencil, you like drawing,
"you like blending, why don't you just push it
"as far as you can get it?"
So if you look at it, you may look at it and see,
oh, it looks like a painting, and it kinda does.
And that was kind of the point of it,
I really wanted to fool people into thinking
it was a painting.
A lot of people think it's watercolors,
some people think it's oils,
and it's actually colored pencils.
And the mask came into my concept
around 2011 in graduate school.
There's a lot of reasons for that,
one of which is I was really at the time
dealing with identity,
and duplicating identities, so multiple identities,
dealing with a private identity that we all have
that we keep to ourselves, kind of a secret identity,
and we don't share it with other people,
and then a public identity or a persona
that we show to the rest of the world.
And so the mask kind of functioned in that way,
the mask or ski mask, or another word for it is a balaclava,
so I got really into that.
And the masks also at the time were very kind of
in the news a lot.
There was, Spring Breakers came out at the time.
There was also the punk rock band from Russia,
Pussy Riot, that came out and it was all over the news,
this radical revolutionary punk rock band.
And then there was also
the Occupy movement that was happening at the time
in San Francisco and all over the world.
So I was there and a lot of my friends were there,
and people were protesting and they were at City Hall,
and they were blocking highways, interstates.
So there was a lot of reasons for the mask at the time,
2011, 2012, and lot of reasons for it in the news
and politically.
So after that I wanted to move, after grad school,
away from the mask.
Everybody at that time was starting to call me
the Mask Girl, (audience chuckling)
and I was like, I kinda wanna move away from that,
that title.
But I still wanted to kind of deal
with masking to some degree,
so if we don't mind taking another walk,
kind of behind, over here.
(audio skips)
So the next piece I did was actually this piece here
which is also colored pencil,
where I still had the figure at the forefront
and also in a domestic space similar
to the pieces in the back,
but without the mask, without the balaclava.
And I really like that.
I like this kind of, you know, back to my roots
in figurative work
and seeing where I could go with just the figure
and without the mask.
So from there I did a few pieces in watercolor.
I wanted to change up my medium,
get away from the colored pencil a bit.
The colored pencil is super time-consuming.
That piece on the end probably took me three months,
working probably 30 hours a week on it,
so it's hundreds of hours of work going into that.
So I needed to speed up my process
so I chose watercolor,
which is actually a really kind of painstaking process, too,
but somehow easier than colored pencil.
So I started working
with the idea of masking but without the mask,
like I was saying.
This is a good example of that,
where all of the figures have their backs to us,
so I'm kind of masking them through their own bodies.
So everybody's back is to the audience.
I consider that a form of masking as well.
A lot of them also have some sort of glasses
or sunglasses on their faces,
so it's also masking in that way.
And the watercolor was, I used the watercolor
because it was kind of more freeing
and I had such a great time with them,
but they were still going very slowly.
I started to kind of think about where to go next
and if you turn around behind again,
over to the egg tempera.
I wanted to kind of loosen up a little bit more.
So these pieces are just a small body of work.
I'll probably go back to the egg tempera a little bit later
but I was actually, I had to make all of the paint.
Egg tempera is a really interesting medium
because you actually take powder
and you have to grind it down with distilled water
and egg yolks and then you blend all of the pigment
together with that to get your colors.
So it took awhile, I wanted to kind let go,
loosen up a little bit,
and be a little bit more abstract
and give myself a little bit more of space to be expressive
and not be so tied to realism,
which I have been, all the way through grad school,
and so that's kind of how you can see the change
from these hyper-realistic pieces in the corner over here
to a little bit looser in the watercolor,
and then coming over here and they're a lot more abstract.
So from there I wanted to go kind of out the other side.
I really enjoyed the color mixing with the egg tempera,
but again, it was kind of a painstaking process
grinding all the pigment.
It smelled kinda bad because I was using eggs,
which I don't think my husband appreciated very much.
And so back again, sorry guys,
we'll just keep moving around.
So this whole back wall, hi Frank Wright. (chuckles)
This whole back wall is my newest work.
I created these 10 pieces, oil paintings,
in the last six months.
The catalyst for these, I would say,
were a couple of things.
One was, I found out that I got this show,
I found out that I got a show in Portland,
and I wanted to try something new.
I wanted to push myself again in a different direction.
I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to go
or how I wanted to do it,
but I did know that it needed to be fast,
and faster than I had been working up to that point.
So I ended up choosing oils, going back to oils,
which I hadn't done in about eight or 10 years,
and yeah, and making much larger work.
So most of the pieces, you can see around,
are 22 inches by 30 inches.
And my studio in San Francisco is only 80 square feet,
so that's only eight feet by 10 feet,
which if you think about that is very, very small.
These are very large for me.
They're the largest pieces that I've created
since graduate school.
And I created all of these 10 pieces in about six months,
maybe five months.
I'm really excited about them.
Joel and I went to Europe over the holidays
for the first time,
and went to Paris, we went to Madrid,
and we took photos of people in museums.
And we took photos of them taking photos of the work,
we took photos of them not looking at the work,
not paying attention to the work,
ignoring the work, only looking at their Facebook.
I'm sure if went today it would just be Pokemon Go.
So it was a really interesting kind of experience
being there and it wasn't anything like I had expected.
I kinda had expected everybody to be really, really, really
interested in the pieces, because I had been.
It took me 34 years to get to Europe for the first time
and I'm a visual artist, I'm a professional visual artist,
and it took me that long to get there
and to see all these famous paintings.
And I just thought everybody else would feel the same way
when they got to see the Mona Lisa for the first time.
And instead, it looked like that.
And if anybody's been to the Louvre in Paris,
I'm sure this is also your experience, right?
Raise your hand if you've been to the Louvre
and you've had that experience.
Yeah, it's a lot.
And it's so hard, right?
It's like, a super-huge crowd,
you're trying to like, push through everybody,
and everybody has their phones up in the air.
Everybody has their cameras up in the air,
and no one's really looking at the work.
They might be looking at the work
but they're looking through a screen,
and I thought that was a really interesting way
that society has gone,
and a new perspective that we all kind of have on the world
where we see everything through screens.
Which I feel like technology is
a really great thing in our lives,
but the downside is that we have to experience things
often through, like, a pane of glass.
So yeah, that's about it.
I know I missed a lot of information,
but if you guys want to ask any questions
feel free to do so.
Anybody?
I would love a drink of water, thank you.
No one wants to ask questions?
- You know, it's funny, as soon as you said that
I was like, that's actually another form of masking, right?
It's another way for us to guard ourselves
and another barrier between us and reality.
So it's another form of masking
and I hadn't thought about that, so thank you, Katie.
Good question.
I don't know if I answered your question though.
I'm sorry, what did you say, I was--
- Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, yeah, and I guess it is.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to continue with this direction.
I very much, I love the oil painting.
I love the looseness of it,
I love the quickness of it.
Like I was saying earlier, one of the pieces,
the colored pencil pieces took me three months to make.
Sometimes they were taking me six months to make,
and it's just not something, like,
I was physically not able to do it
and ultimately it just didn't feel quite worth it.
But these pieces, some of them have been,
I can get out in a week or sometimes four or five days,
which is really great.
It feels like successful, like I can keep going,
and the colors are so amazing.
I started to get into the background.
I actually didn't talk a lot about the background
but I had been purposefully and intentionally
leaving out the background with most of these pieces
to have everybody focus in on what I was focusing on,
which was the figures.
So for a long time, many years,
I just obliterated, eliminated the backgrounds
to force the viewer to look at what I wanted them
to look at.
So I told myself I would not bring
the backgrounds back again until I knew for sure
that there was a specific purpose for that.
So with the museums, obviously, the paintings
were a huge focus that I wanted to make sure that,
that people knew that they were paintings,
that people were kind of missing out on the whole experience
of experiencing a painting through, you know,
looking at their screens or their phones.
Anybody else?
- Yeah, I think so.
I think I needed a break after grad school
because I had done about 10 of those pieces, I think,
and they took me, I think 10 pieces took me about two years,
and that was pretty much full-time,
because I was in grad school at the time.
So it was a lot and I just definitely needed
a break from it.
But maybe, yeah, I like them.
Yeah, they're really nice.
I wish I could just hire out.
Can I outsource that?
- That's a good question.
It changes all the time.
I think maybe the Rousseau, that piece right there
is maybe my favorite right now.
I love the colors in it,
that, like, teal background
and the red are really amazing.
Yeah, that's a Henri Rousseau piece
and I really, really enjoyed painting that.
- Oh, I'm sorry, yes, Jackson.
There's a whole other grouping of watercolors over there.
So when I was in, I went to Jackson, Wyoming
about two years, a year and a half ago
for a month on an artist residency through Teton Art Lab
which is this really great organization in Jackson.
And they flew me in and paid for my stay,
and I stayed there for a month
and I just got to make work for an entire month
in this beautiful mountain town in the Tetons.
And if any of you have been there,
it's just a gorgeous, gorgeous little place.
And there's only about 9,000 people there.
There's about two roads that go up and down,
so I spend my days, like nine to five, painting,
all watercolors.
At the time I was doing the watercolor series,
and in the evening sometimes I would take drives.
It was February so it was super snowy.
The elk refuge, there was an elk refuge
right outside of Jackson,
and there are like 8,000 elk that come there
for the winter.
And so I'd go out and just hang out with the elk
and the big-horned sheep and
it was just a really peaceful, amazing experience.
And I went there with the intention to actually
photograph tourists.
There was a lot of, and there still kind of is
obviously with these pieces,
an element of tourism that's kind of a recurring theme
throughout my work,
and leisure culture, and things like that.
And so my, Jackson is a tourist town
and it's a tourist town especially in the summertime.
It's very close to Yellowstone.
The Tetons are there and Teton National Park,
and in the wintertime it's a tourist destination
for skiers and snowboarders,
outdoor sports, winter sports.
So yeah, I went there with the intention
to photograph tourists, but there weren't a lot
because they were all up at the ski mountain.
So I ended up photographing daily life,
so I kind of got into the townspeople
and interviewing them and chatting with them
and seeing what daily life was like for people
living in a very, very, highly-trafficked tourist town.
And so that's kind of how everything came to be
with those pieces.
And the white space really functioned well as snow.
It kind of doubles, for me,
the negative space doubles
because it still allows the viewer to focus
specifically on the people,
but it also functions as snow,
so it worked really well in that way, too.
Did I miss anything?
Anybody else have questions?
- [Audience Member] Thank you, Michelle!
- Yeah, thank you all for coming.
(audience applauding)
If you have any questions,
feel free to pull me aside.
I don't know how much more time we have,
but, yeah.
We'll walk around and check out the work more.
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